Can I Record Music From Cassette Tape To Computer
Yes, you can. Either take your cassette players output and plug it directly into your soundcard to record the audio. Or make use of the numerous hardware solutions on the market that are relatively inexpensive these days.
Why bother transferring cassette tapes to your computer or laptop at all when there are so many listen on-demand services available today from Spotify, Amazon, Deezer and many more.
Well maybe it’s nostalgia or perhaps you’ve been in the attic and dug out a load of old tapes of you and your friends jamming thirty years ago in your dad’s garage. Who wouldn’t want to digitize them and shoot off a quick email to embarrass all of those who took part.
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Tape Player To Soundcard
If you’ve got a reasonable cassette player hanging around with a 3.5 mm jack or RCA connections then with a decent soundcard in your PC you can simply connect the two and record the audio as it’s being played.
This will also work if the player has an output for a 6.35 mm audio jack. There are many cheap adapters on the market that will downsize that to 3.5 mm. Most soundcards will take a 3.5 mm input.
So for this section, the answer is the output of your current tape player is plugged directly into the input of your computer soundcard.
If your soundcard does not have the required interface then you can purchase a USB converter to take the output of the player, like the v.top below.
This Wikihow article explains nicely how to record the sound coming from your cassette player.
Hardware Solutions For Digitising Audio From Casette Tapes
This is probably an easier method than connecting the cassette player to the computer directly.
Some options do not need your computer at all.
You could buy a USB Cassette to MP3 Converter that records your tapes straight onto a USB storage stick. You can then take your recordings anywhere and transfer them to any machine you wish.
The only other method we should mention, although it is not recommended, because of its low sound quality is simply recording with a microphone the output of your tape player as it is playing through its loudspeakers.
This will give the worse recording of all the methods mentioned above.
